Category Archives: Blog

This blog, blogs in general, and blogging

More Visitors, More Stats

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I can’t quite believe the growth in visitors to this site. Since I posted about my visitor count passing the quarter of a million mark on June 1st, I have had another 50,000 visitors taking the total count to well over 300,000! That’s 25,000 visitors a month. For little old me, I find that quite impressive. I’ve also had over half a million page views in that time. The page views counter passed three and a half million a while ago.

I know that being one of the feeds to the WordPress dashboard helps, but the vast majority of my visitors still come from search engines. Eleven of my top fifteen referrers are search engines. Of those, Google accounts for a whopping 76% of search engine hits. In fact, as I write this, the last 15 minutes has seen 15 unique visitors 12 of whom are visiting old pages via search engines.

With all this visitor activity, it certainly seems that my page caching is holding out ok. I still get some weird slow-downs on the server, but I think some of that is down to the statistics package I use, Power Pphlogger is starting to creak at the seams. I doesn’t appear that version 3 is going to appear any time soon, so I’m starting to look elsewhere.

When Did You Last Backup Your WordPress?

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Don’t forget we are only half way through WordPress Backup Week.

WordPress is celebrating blog security and protection with WordPress Backup Week July 23-30.

WordPress, one of the most popular blogging and website management tools, is sponsoring WordPress Backup Week July 23-30. Step-by-step backup instructions will be available in the online manual, the WordPress Codex, and online in the WordPress Support Forum to help you through the process.

There is lots of help on the WordPress Backup page, covering common hosting control panels like cPanel, Ensim, Plesk, and many more. It also covers using phpMyAdmin and other, simpler, methods. Lots of links to resources too. It’s worth a read, even if you have a backup routine, to make sure you are covering everything. You might pick up a useful tip to do it more efficiently.

Read on for the full press release. Continue reading →

Site updates

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Page Caching

I’ve made some minor changes to the blog over the last few days. Firstly, I’ve been using Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache 2.0 plugin. This is an efficient WordPress page caching system. It should make the site much faster and responsive. WP-Cache started life as the “Staticize Reloaded” by matt and billzeller. I like the fact that it automatically invalidates the appropriate cache files when you publish a post or page or comment.

It also allows you to have portions of you page remain dynamic. This is fantastic. I needed my page counter to remain dynamic in order to be accurate.

Random Gallery Image

Someone kindly pointed out that clicking on the random Gallery image in the side bar was opening up the gallery in the tiny little iframe still in the sidebar. Not very useful that. I remembered that I could include the random image directly in the sidebar, but that the code wasn’t XHTML compatible. With the caching plugin it would also mean that the image would stop being random.

For my second tweak I ended up having to do a couple of things. One was to hack the Gallery code to produce valid XHTML. Unfortunately the dynamic part of the caching code which allows you to include a php file assumes that it needs to prepend ABSPATH to the include. That’s not the case for the random gallery image. So the last task was to tweak the dynamic part of the caching plugin so that I could include my gallery random image code from an http url.

Update 21/07/2005: I’ve submitted a trac ticket with a patch against the latest revision to implement this.

Speed up

I hope these changes help the site to run faster. It had been slowing down again. This was due to too many externally generated content in the sidebars. This is all cached now so things should be much quicker.

Too many 404’s

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I use a custom 404 page on this site which emails me a notification whenever a bad request for a page is made. Over the last five days I’ve received in excess of 15,000 of these 404 emails. Oh dear!

This system has been pretty useful for spotting mistakes, mine and other peoples. If I include a wrong link in a post, I soon start getting 404 emails. I can quickly correct the issue. If someone else has a bad link to me, the email includes the referer (sic) field, so I can quickly trace the problem. Great stuff! It’s been working fine for ages.

Then, a few days ago, I notice a lot (a few hundred) of 404 emails in the Gmail folder they are automatically shunted to. I glanced through them and noticed that they looked like permanent links to my old blog url .../b2/archives/p/1234... that had been somehow corrupted into .../journalized//p/1234/.... I also noticed that it was Yahoo’s search engine web crawler. I moved one back to my Gmail inbox and popped a star on there to remind me to look into it.

So here I am today looking into it. I still hadn’t realized there were more than a few hundred! It was only when I fired up Thunderbird to clear out my POP3 mailboxes, that I saw some 20,000 emails waiting to download!

A fairly quick investigation revealed that my old b2 redirect script was still in place. But when I changed some code around and added some debug to it, I got nothing. Ah ha! I vaguely remembered fiddling with redirects in my .htaccess file the other day. I quickly spotted the culprit and commented out the line. Yay! instantly fixed.

I’d been trying to short circuit the PHP redirect code with the quicker apache redirect for the simplest case with the following line: Redirect Permanent /b2/archives https://journalized.zed1.com/ There are so many regular expression RedirectMatch lines in there that I forgot that that line would retain the rest of the URL when redirecting. You can even see where the extra slash came from!

Lesson learned: When making a change like this don’t just check it works, check that the other stuff isn’t broken!

WordPress 1.5.1.3 Released

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WordPress 1.5.1.3 was released this morning. This release contains a security fix that is well worth having. Whilst the particular vulnerability hasn’t been officially announced, it’s not too hard to figure it out.

I’ve just upgraded the dozen or so blogs I manage and it was quite painless. There are some other fixes along with the security fix so don’t hesitate to get it.

Stop! Thief!

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Who the heck is this cheeky so-and-so? Someone going by the name of ‘refekt’ has thrown up a WordPress blog with half-a-dozen or so of my blog postings under their own name! They even gone so far as to reproduce the markup I used as well as the blog being one of my themes.

The blog is at podzice.com. The domain is owned by Chi-Tak Chow of whitewater, WI.
I’ve contacted the hosting service and cc-ed the Administrative Contact for the domain. Alas the latter bounced immediately.

update 1:20am: Here’s another one. www.golig.com/wp This time just taking the headlines and first few words, presumably to have some content to experiment with.

Update 26/06/2005: I’ve had no response from either the owner or the hosting company and there are a couple of new stories on there now (neither are mine). So I went ahead and registered on his blog (you have to register in order to comment). I’ve left a polite comment on each of the 8 or 9 posts which have been stolen from me. They are flagged for moderation, I await a response.

Resolved! 26/06/2005: Chris Parkerson at his hosting company has removed the posts with my content! Great. Thanks Chris!
I also got a separate email from the owner of the site explaining he had given posting privileges to the guy who was responsible and won’t be doing that again.

Journalized Blue

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Update 7 Dec 2008: This theme is superseded by Journalized Theme version 2.7. Please use that version from now on.

Update 12 Nov 2008 There is a new Beta version 2.7 available to try, see the theme page for details. Please download it and give it a try.

This version is now defunct and will no longer be maintained.

On this page you can find the latest version of my blog layout and colour scheme as a WordPress theme.
Clicking the thumbnail below will show you a full size screen shot of the theme in action.
screenshot of journalized theme

This release incorporates many of the fixes and changes suggested by people trying the theme.

You can download the files from here: journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.tar.gz (tar ball for unix or similar users) or journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.zip (zip file for Windows users).

To install simply expand the archive on your local machine. You should have a directory called ‘journalized-blue’. Upload the directory and the files within it to your wp-content/themes folder on your server. Login to your blog’s administration pages and go to the Presentation page. The new theme should be listed there ready for you to select. If not check the permissions on your uploaded files.

Enjoy! The theme is licensed under the GPL. So you may modify it and distribute it. Please let me know if you use it, modify it, etc. If you have any questions leave a comment on this post with your question. Comments are moderated so you won’t see your comment immediately.

What’s Changed?

The main changes in the themes are these:

I’ve added missing tags to the main section of the theme. That is, the ‘Previous Entries’ and ‘Next Entries’ links after the main content. I’ve also added in the Next and previous story links above the post when you are looking at an individual post.
In the side bar I’ve removed all the get_links() and get_linksbyname() calls and substituted a single call to get_links_list().

I’ve adjusted the CSS to display the nested unordered lists from the call to display like the h4/rightsidesection combination we had before.

I’ve added a page template for pages like this one with slightly different layout for the content. There are some minor bug fixes on the pages and I’ve added the the fix for aligned or floated images not displaying in Internet Explorer.

Update: 27/06/2005
Because the side bars are narrower on Journalized blue than Sand or Winter, the calendar on the right hand side doesn’t quite fit.
A quick cure is to change the padding in the cells. You need to edit the table#wp-calendar td rule in style.css
Go to line 307 and change the 3 pixel padding to 2 pixels. It should end up like this:

table#wp-calendar td {
    padding: 0px 2px;
    color: #000000;
    text-align:center;
}

I’ll issue a new version as soon as I’ve incorporated another fix and some recent changes.